Months after the Brian Williams’ fiasco, NBC News is again amending the details of a war story. This time a journalist who was kidnapped in Syria has uncovered new details that he was misled about the affiliations of the group who took him.

NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel and three
other crew members were detained in December 2012 while trying to
move into Syria from Turkey. Five days after being caught, Engel
said the crew managed to escape while being moved from one
location to another. The claimed that the kidnappers were group
supporting Syrian President Bashar Assad, but now the network
admitted it rushed to conclusions due to "an
elaborate ruse."

During the botched entry into Syria, kidnappers reportedly
blindfolded the journalists and tossed them into the back of a
truck.

“The kidnappers told us they were Shiite militiamen, members
of the notorious Shabiha militia loyal to the government of
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,” Engel wrote in an
NBC News statement released Wednesday
evening. “They spoke in a particular accent, playing Shiite
chants on their cellphones, smoking cigarettes, even serving us
coffee in cups decorated with Shiite symbols. I, along with two
other Arabic speaking members of our six-member team, believed
they were from the Shabiha.”

@snarwani@nbc pray what is a "shia
accent"? I come from an Indian city that had Shia rulers with
sunni majority. they speak same language.

But the New York Times contacted NBC News about a month ago,
saying it had “uncovered information that suggested the
kidnappers were not who they said they were and that the Syrian
rebels who rescued us had a relationship with the
kidnappers,” Engel wrote.

“Mr. Engel and his team underwent a harrowing ordeal, and it
is a common tactic for kidnappers in war zones to intentionally
mislead hostages as to their identity,” the NY Times wrote
of the incident.

Good piece, but Engel is in no way blameless. He's caught
lying; hyper-spins sectarian tales to suit his narrative.
https://t.co/cCLzP3mqsY

Both NBC News and the NY Times investigated the kidnapping,
interviewing those involved in the search for NBC’s team, rebel
fighters and activists in Syria, Syrian exiles in the US and
Turkey, a man who said he was one of the guards for the captive
group, and current and former NBC News employees.

Re-reporting the story was difficult due to the evolving war in
Syria, Engel said.

“We reached out to contacts inside and outside of Syria. The
rise of ISIS and the deteriorating situation in Syria mean that
we are no longer able to visit the part of Syria where we were
taken,” he wrote. “Many of our most reliable sources
have now escaped and live as refugees in neighboring Turkey. Many
of those directly involved, including the leader of the group
that rescued us, have since been killed. Others have gone into
exile or hiding and can't be reached.”

Nonetheless, both news organizations reached the same conclusion:
The kidnapped crew was taken “by a criminal gang for money
and released for propaganda purposes,” Engel wrote.

The NY Times concluded that Engel’s team “was almost
certainly taken by a Sunni criminal element affiliated with the
Free Syrian Army, the loose alliance of rebels opposed to Mr.
Assad.”

The kidnappers were from a group known as the North Idlib Falcons
Brigade. They were led by two men, Azzo Qassab and Shukri Ajouj,
who had a history of smuggling and other crimes. The journalists
were said to have been freed by another rebel group, Ahrar
al-Sham, “which had a relationship with Mr. Qassab and Mr.
Ajouj,” the NY Times reported. Engel’s release “was
staged after consultation with rebel leaders when it became clear
that holding them might imperil the rebel efforts to court
Western support.”

NBC executives were told of the two men’s possible involvement
both during and after the kidnapping, current and former NBC
employees and others who helped search for the journalists told
the NY Times.

Pretty hard to square NYT account (left) with Engel's account
(right), which elides the Q of NBC's own views in 2012.
pic.twitter.com/qFmJKaPiRq

The reporting mistakes unveiled by the two investigations into
the group or groups that captured and released the NBC
journalists were not the only problems with Engel’s story about
the incident, however. Like Brian
Williams before him, Engel misreported key details of the
ordeal.

In a Vanity Fair article published shortly after his release,
Engel said he saw one of his captors lying dead as the kidnapped
journalists escaped during a firefight at a checkpoint manned by
members of the Ahrar al-Sham brigade, a Syrian rebel group.

Engel admitted that he never saw the dead body in the updated
account released Wednesday evening.

“Producer Aziz Akyavas climbed out of the van through the
driver side door. He says he saw and stepped over a body that lay
by the front wheel. I climbed out of the passenger side
door,” Engel wrote. “Under the circumstances, and
especially since Aziz said that he had seen and stepped over a
body, I didn't doubt it and later reported it as fact.”